Open Realm of Stars 0.19.0Beta

OROS 0.19.0Beta has been released and with trailer.

In this version there can be 12 realms in the galaxy. This actually changed the game quite much. First is that galaxy size needs to be medium or larger. This causes that nuclear engines are not that good when travelling big distances. Another is that winning is more difficult. Since most of the victory conditions have relations how many realms there are in game. For cultural victory one needs to get half of the realms - 1 to admire one's culture, conquest victory require conquering half of the home planets, population victory is even more difficult since one must gain half of the galaxy population. So getting any of those victory conditions is hard than comparing to 8 realm game.

Another new things are orbitals. Planets can have orbital which do not take building slot. Orbitals are designed in ship designer and components are selected from available technology. These can contain starbase modules, so these can boost planet's research, cultural or credit production. If orbitals contain scanner these scanner can replace planetary scanners. Orbitals are also used for defending planet against attackers. These orbitals are moving in planet view.

Planets now have suitability which varies on each space race. Some of the space race might be more suitable for water worlds, while some one likes carbon worlds or even iron worlds. Suitability of planet can be increased researching new technology. This suitability limits the maximum amount of population on planet. For example planet size of 12 and suitability of 50% could only hold 6 population.

Tractor beam can now use for stealing other realm's ships in combat. First target ship needs to be immobilized and all military weapons need to be offline. After this ship can be stolen during combat.

There are couple of graphical changes. First game can be now run in full-screen mode, which is great for immersion. I also added minor movement of nebulae in quite many views to make it feel more lively. 

There are also some minor changes like that all realms can be AI controlled. This is for me to see how AI is actually playing and hopefully I can make AI more smarter in future versions. Two second minor changes auto exploring and AI controller combat. Both of these were requests. Both auto exploring and AI control in combat both uses same standard AI which is used also in regular AI turns. Turns out that exploring AI is quite bad and needs to be rewritten in next version.

Next version probably contains quite much AI improvements and that exploration algorithm. AI having fewer planets than human is pretty significant handicap. One them could be difficulty levels for AI. I am wondering if players generally hate or love challenging AI or even losing for AI. I like to lose in my own game, but I kind of hate it in other games so I might need to do AI difficulty levels. But I am not going to give bonuses or negative bonuses, I am just going make it more stupid on lower difficulty levels.

Any way if you are interested about the game source files are available in Github